Saturday, April 15, 2017

"Inside the Big Business of Imagining the Future"

From The Verge:

The Future Agency

In the Dubai of
2050, the world looks both instantly familiar and utterly strange.
Here, urban planning is driven by an omniscient AI installed at the top
of a skyscraper; your smart bathroom mirror tracks your physical health;
and you interface with the government through a personalized “genie,” a
hologram in the form of a virtual Emirati gentleman in traditional
garb. All of these future products are skinned in a particular visual
aesthetic of friendly white-on-black animated icons like a minimalist,
sentient version of Apple’s iOS.

This uncanny scene was on display at the United Arab
Emirates’ second annual Government Summit, hosted in Dubai in February
2014. A three-day event comprised of dozens of speakers — including Sir
Richard Branson — and over 4,000 participants, it bills itself as the
“largest annual government gathering in the world.” The gathering was
meant to “build hope, build life and future, and make people happy,”
said Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, prime minister of the UAE
and royal ruler of Dubai, during the event. The urban AI, hologram
genie, and smart bathroom were part of the Museum of Future Government
Services, a series of seamless interactive installations that
demonstrated to attendees — Emirati politicians and civil servants, as
well as foreign dignitaries and business leaders — how the UAE would
serve its citizens several decades hence.

The Museum of Future Government Services was created by
Tellart, a technology-focused design agency, headquartered thousands of
miles away in Rhode Island. Launched in 2000, Tellart now employs 38
individuals spread across offices in Providence, New York, San
Francisco, Amsterdam, and Dubai. The UAE government is one of the
company’s largest clients; the two entities collaborate on the
Government Summit events and are developing a permanent Museum of the Future in Dubai.

Of course, none of the products demonstrated at the 2014
summit actually existed. Rather, Tellart’s job is to create believable,
immersive visions of the future based on the needs of its clients, which
range from the UAE to Google, Purina, and the California Academy of
Sciences — anyone who needs a little bit of tomorrow today. As the
company’s co-founder Nick Scappaticci says, “We are the industrial
designers of the 21st century.”

Tellart is at the forefront of an industry that doesn’t really have a
name. What it does is sometimes labeled “design fiction,” a genre that
might be defined as “prototypes that allow you to suspend your disbelief
about the ways the world is changing around you,” says Alexander
Porter, the co-founder of Scatter, a virtual reality storytelling studio
in Brooklyn.

Design fiction is created by a loose confederation of
agencies, artists, engineers, and designers who are shaping our
expectations of technology and society in decades to come by showing us
what that incipient world might look like, down to its cliche brand
logos. It’s science fiction made real in the form of interactive
exhibitions, product demonstrations, and behind-the-scenes consulting
work. And it tends to pop up at any event Davos-ish enough to include
the word “influencers.”

Alongside Tellart, the industry is made up of
organizations like Barbarian Group, the now-defunct BERG London, Fake
Love (acquired by The New York Times Company in August 2016), and
Google’s Creative Lab. Even if you’re unfamiliar with these names, it’s
likely you’ve seen their handiwork in high-tech viral videos, like this rendering
of a mundane living room turning into an immersive intergalactic VR
video game, created by the studio Marshmallow Laser Feast for Sony;
Superflux’s 2011 “Song of the Machine,”
a prophetic rendering of VR technology as seen through a walk in
London; or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s miniature
quadcopters caught assembling a rope bridge in midair.

Lesser future design fiction projects resemble mediocre
advertising, the detritus of CES or the fever dreams of a self-styled
futurist like AOL’s Shingy. It can be as basic as a drone that takes
selfies or a 3D burrito printer. “There’s a lot of stuff that almost
exists to chase the Fast Company headline,” says Colin James
Nagy, Barbarian Group’s former chief of media and strategy. Yet however
reductive, these design miniatures still help form our idea of what the
future can be.

“It's really easy to freak people out with science
fiction. It's a heavy responsibility,” says Tellart co-founder Matt
Cottam when I first meet him and Scappaticci at the company’s New York
outpost, located in the corner of a Chelsea loft. He cites a maxim from
the author and New School sociology instructor Barbara Adams: “Every act
of future making is an act of future taking." Cottam continues, “While
creating a high fidelity image of the future may broaden people's
imagination for what's possible, it can also really narrow their
perception of what's possible or what their options are.”

He cites a potent example: one Museum of Future
Government Services installation involved handing guests warm towels in
the way an upscale hotel might. After the guests gave the towels back to
attendants, they were scanned for biometric data to determine visitors’
identities and backgrounds. A screen displayed a visualization of their
bodies and whether or not any dangerous communicable diseases were
found.

After passing through, one pregnant Emirati woman came to
Cottam worried that the scan might have impacted her baby. “I was like,
‘That scanner was a Microsoft Kinect and a projector,’” Cottam says, no
more harmful than playing a video game. Although no actual biometric
data scan happened, the experience left the attendee feeling that the
technology was invasive and dystopian.

While predicting the future is an eternal pursuit,
rendering it experiential is a more modern innovation. The 1939 World’s
Fair, with its theme of “The World of Tomorrow,” included Futurama, an
exhibit sponsored by the General Motors Corporation and designed by the
industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes. Its major forecast was a highway
system connecting the entire country, and its rendering of a city block,
with clean glass-and-steel buildings rising above a street crowded with
cars, has been borne out by history, though not always in a positive
sense; the installation’s “super highway of tomorrow” looks like the
worst parts of the New Jersey Turnpike today.

Data-driven future prediction emerged around 1948 with
the launch of RAND Corporation. The nonprofit think tank’s “scenario
analysis” practice connected military planning with private technology
development. RAND’s tactics were adopted by Shell in the 1970s, creating
a precedent for the corporate future-consulting we see today....MUCH MORE